This essay explores the role of the dictionary in religious history, specifically as a conduit of social and intellectual authority brought to bear in religious interpretation, sitting both upstream and downstream of the broader flow of history, culture, and forms of knowledge. Of particular interest is the history of three categories of reference works: the bilingual dictionary (or lexicon) focused on ancient biblical languages; the Bible dictionary, focused on biblical realia, geography, and similar topics; and the theological dictionary, focused on significant biblical ideas associated with particular words or the ancient speakers. The categories are situated historically in the development of biblical scholarship and philology in the West, from the pre-modern era through the contemporary and digital context. Two case studies demonstrate the intersection between dictionaries, biblical interpretation, and cultural ideologies: use of Bible dictionaries and lexicons in the antebellum period as a tool for attacking or defending slavery on biblical grounds in the American South; and the influence on theological dictionaries in the early twentieth century from the anti-Semitic context of Nazi Germany.

This chapter explores the impact of the Reformation on Jewish–Christian relations and the Protestant return to Hebrew Scripture. Documents show the beginnings of modernity and its offspring: toleration, emancipation and antisemitism.

Macedonian conqueror, in both Jewish and Christian sources, was a composite and of complicated design. It was constantly created and recreated, using varied techniques and inspirations, which resulted in a number of disparate, fragmentary projections. The dominant features of these projections were selected according to the immediate need and agenda of the text in which the figure of Alexander appeared. There is a certain continuity between the development of Alexander stories and legends in the Jewish milieu and those of the Greek and Roman pagan traditions, but there are significant innovations as well. As for the Christian authors, as much as they were familiar with Classical writings on Alexander, they would also exploit the Jewish corpus of Alexander legends, some of which have no direct parallel in Greco-Roman pagan writings.

This chapter examines the not fully researched Hebrew manuscript MS hébr. 1199 from the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris, which is an illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in northern Italy at the end of the fifteenth century. It describes plants and their uses, and is part of a specific herbal tradition called the ‘Alchemical Herbals’. There are specific illustrations of plants in this tradition in which the roots are emphasised (typically depicted in geometrical, zoomorphic, or anthropomorphic forms). It is apparent from a comparative analysis of both the texts and illustrations that the Jewish scribe(s) and artist deliberately altered the texts and illustrations. As will be demonstrated, Jews were also involved in another Latin manuscript within this tradition. This chapter provides insight into herbal knowledge, the people behind manuscripts production, and the practical function of the manuscripts. Furthermore, it illustrates how pharmacological knowledge was transmitted between cultures.

Chapter 2 exposes a subtle yet thoroughgoing aspect of De Excidio’s anti-Jewish rhetoric at the crossroads of language and identity. It shows how Pseudo-Hegesippus creates a conceptual distinction between the Jews (Iudaei), who are ignoble, and their ancient ancestors, the Hebrews (Hebraei), who are noble, as a way of couching the work’s historical narrative within a framework of Christian supersessionism.

Psychology’s past in Eastern civilizations were an inherent part of the religious and moral philosophies. In an overview of those non-Western traditions in psychology, points of interaction between East and West occurred in Persia, which served as a crossroad between India and the Arab world. Ancient Indian culture followed the traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism. The writings of the Vedas, especially the Upanishads, provided the foundation for Hindu philosophy. In China, imported Buddhism taught that self-denial and proper thinking were necessary to achieve well-being. However, the older philosophical movement of Confucianism offered a stronger basis for Chinese intellectual progress. Both Buddhism and Confucianism were exported to Japan, where they were transposed into Japanese philosophies to support nationalistic aspirations. Two Middle Eastern cultures, Egyptian and Hebrew, are important as predecessors for the ancient Greeks whose philosophical formulations would provide the foundations for the emergence of psychology. Egyptian achievements in art and architecture left us a legacy, especially expressed in astronomy and medicine. The Jewish foundation of monotheism and law, along with an understanding of the person as a unity of spirit and matter, interfaced with the Greek culture that was to dominate the Mediterranean world.

Taking its cues from John Tzetzes’ commentaries on Aristophanes, this chapter investigates the idea of exegesis as performance. Commenting on texts was far from a disembodied act in Byzantium; on the contrary, it required an effort that was both intellectual and physical. Not unlike today, holding a class was an exercise calling for a series of structured bodily and mental practices to be successful. The first part of this chapter addresses the entanglements between performativity and manuscript production by looking at what Tzetzes’ scholia on Aristophanes tell us about the setting and the execution of the actual exegetical activity. The second part focuses on Commentary on Aristophanes’ Frogs 843a in order to show that appropriation of non-Hellenic traditions played a part in the performative and exegetical engagement with the classics in Constantinople toward the end of the twelfth century.

The ‘Sidney psalter’ has attracted critical attention for the extraordinary metrical versatility displayed by Philip and (mostly) Mary Sidney in their complete set of psalm paraphrases in English. Ithas not however been discussed in the context of the neo-Latin metrical usage and experiment of the latter sixteenth century described in Chapter 2, although the Sidney psalter precisely reproduces in English the literary achievement in Latin of the major Protestant psalm paraphrases by George Buchanan and Theodore de Bèze (Beza). Of great devotional and literary importance for Protestants throughout Europe, these two collections were recognized immediately by contemporaries for their literary achievement, and Buchanan’s, in particular, was routinely cited until well into the eighteenth century. Taken together, they are crucial landmarks in the development of a Protestant Latin poetics, combining the literary achievement of humanism with a distinctively Protestant emphasis upon the literal meaning of the Hebrew Bible. This chapter describes theachievement and influence of these Latin works and sets out the evidence for their direct influence upon Mary Sidney in particular.

This chapter discusses – in the general problematics of languages in contact – Jewish languages and languages of the Diaspora. It intends to study from a comparative perspective especially the diachrony of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish, two diasporic languages with similar developments and destinies. After a short presentation of the two languages, we examine successively: 1) the creation of Judaeo-languages in Diaspora, 2) the Diaspora versus migration, 3) the Judaeo-calque languages, 4) the common dynamics of Jewish languages, and 5) the diachrony of Jewish languages. The conclusion focuses on the successful innovations appearing in a Jewish language. It points out the important role of the Hebrew component (its direct and indirect influence), as well as the broad interlinguistic competence of Yiddish and Judaeo-Spanish speakers in the process of evolution of the languages considered.

Psycholinguists often use experimental tasks of word recognition as a window onto understanding how we process words. Here, we review results with the lexical decision task that show sensitivity to morphological structure in that word recognition task. We then highlight the limitations of assuming that evidence of morphological processing is best interpreted as evidence that lexical entries are decomposed into constituent morphemes. Further, when target words follow primes formed from the same stem and presented at brief durations so as to tap into early processing in the lexical decision task, we argue that finding no difference between semantically transparent and opaque pairs in individual priming experiments is not sufficient to conclude that early analysis proceeds without regard to a word’s semantic properties. We familiarize the reader with the intricacies of the priming methodology for the lexical decision task and the claim that target recognition benefits from structural priming based on repetition of a stem morpheme in prime and target in . Inwe then discuss how outcomes change with processing time for the prime and its implication for the claim that when processing time for the prime is curtailed, morphological processing is insensitive to semantics. We argue instead that morphological priming cannot be attributed solely to the letter sequence that constitutes the stem in part because stem repetition accounts downplay the role of differences and similarities of whole-word targets with words other than just its prime. Inwe provide evidence that challenges an account of early morphological processing based on the form but not the semantic consequences of shared morphology between prime and target. In , we summarize meta-analytic results with funnel plots to ascertain the reliability of early effects of semantic similarity among morphological relatives in lexical decision, thus refuting support for a decomposition account that is semantically blind and based on stem form. Finally, in , we touch upon the power of tuning form-with-semantics models across languages and writing systems that differ with respect to their morphological structure and neighborhood density measures by emphasizing patterning distributed across words rather than local decomposition into morphemes. As an alternative throughout, we align results with models in which analysis of wordform and meaning are interdependent, rather than two independent and sequential processes, thus discounting the privileged role reserved for the stem.

The chapter begins with the discussion of the story about the tower of Babel and the confusion of tongues (Gen 11.1–9), the event which was usually but not always understood as the start of linguistic diversification. The chapter explores early Christian ideas about the primordial language, usually identified with Hebrew. The history of Hebrew and the attempts of late antique Christians to define their relations to this would-be original tongue occupy the larger part of the chapter. Fourth- and fifth-century writers discussed whether the original tongue ceased or continued to exist after Babel, and who – Heber or Abraham – was instrumental in preserving the original tongue. These biblical figures and various scenarios of language history they represented were claimed by competing Christian and Jewish historical discourses. These linguistic discussions contributed to consolidating their corresponding religious identities. The alternatives to the idea of Hebrew’s primordiality were also attested; they bear witness to the continuous debates about originality, ontological power, and the relative prestige of languages in Late Antiquity. The chapter attempts to reconstruct Christian attitudes to the linguistic diversity, their views on the history and evolution of other (non-Hebrew) languages, and to contextualize ideas about the language of God in Jewish–Christian polemics.